Travel|‘God Was on Vacation’: A Visit With a Long-Lost Cousin in Romania Is a Holocaust Lesson

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Herastrau Park in Bucharest opened in 1936, just five years before Romania joined its German allies in invading the Soviet Union.CreditCreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

Personal Journeys

‘God Was on Vacation’: A Visit With a Long-Lost Cousin in Romania Is a Holocaust Lesson

Iancu Zuckerman is 95 and the host of a classical music show in Bucharest. But in 1941 he was marched through the streets of Iasi, a center of anti-Semitism. The specters are still there.

Herastrau Park in Bucharest opened in 1936, just five years before Romania joined its German allies in invading the Soviet Union.CreditCreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

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By Edward Zuckerman

Oct. 4, 2018

I had thought I was the last male Zuckerman in our family. Zuckerman is a fairly common Jewish name (see Pinchas, the Philip Roth character, my orthopedic surgeon), but my own family for the last few generations has produced an abundance of daughters, whose children inherited their fathers’ last names.

The only remaining Zuckermans I knew of were myself, my sister and my two daughters (see?). “Zuckerman” means sugar man, marking us as descendants of a sugar beet peddler; so Windsors we’re not, nor Rockefellers, nor Kardashians. But even so …

Then cousin Motti in Israel (last name Klinger) told me about cousin Iancu Zuckerman, aged 95, resident of Bucharest, survivor of a Holocaust “death train,” now happy and healthy and even somewhat prominent in Romania. Motti offered to translate if I ever wanted to visit Iancu.

Romania, ho!

Iancu wasn’t hard to find. When I arrived at my hotel, exhausted and jet-lagged, he was waiting in the lobby. He is a small man, entirely bald except for white fringe at the rear. Motti had told me Iancu was in excellent shape, but how excellent could he be at 95? Sitting beside him was an attractive younger woman (whose name turned out to be Maria; her age, 45). Was she his home health aide? Did Iancu need an attendant? I whispered the questions to Motti, who was waiting with them. No, he said, she’s his girlfriend. “She likes me for my personality,” Iancu told us later. Clearly, he is doing fine.

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The Iasi Train Station, in Romania. In 1941, thousands of Jews were marched to the station and crammed into boxcars for rides to nowhere.CreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

At dinner in the hotel restaurant, Iancu was chatty and happy to see us. He invited me to sample his meal (the chicken soup was excellent, the cow brain croquettes fortunately tasteless) and started to talk about his life. During Romania’s long Communist era, he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. His passion, however, was music. Today he scouts talent for a philanthropist friend who gives grants to promising young musicians, and he hosts a weekly classical music show on Radio Shalom Romania. During his working career, he played violin in the Ministry of Agriculture orchestra.

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of my daughters with the surprising announcement that they were fugitives from the Bucharest police. They’d been coming to the hotel on a bus, for which they had taken great care to purchase the proper tickets. The conductor, however, insisted they hadn’t paid the right fare. He stopped the bus, put them on the sidewalk and said the police were coming to deal with them. A young Romanian woman whispered a word of advice through a bus window: “Run!” They didn’t run. But they walked. There was no evidence of pursuit.

Romania has a problem with corruption, from petty tourist shakedowns to high officials’ malfeasance, and Bucharest, its capital, seems somewhat bereft. A large chunk of the center was razed by the Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was deposed and executed in 1989. Ceausescu had a vision of a grand socialist metropolis, its centerpiece the 1,100-room Palace of Parliament, the largest office building in the world after the Pentagon.

The area that escaped Ceausescu’s bulldozers is dotted with handsome French-inspired buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many, however, are scarred and in need of cleaning. Even a monument in Revolution Square to those who were killed during the demonstrations that preceded Ceausescu’s fall is in need of maintenance. Its base is crumbling.

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A tram stop along Cuza Voda Street in Iasi, Romania. At one time, 35,000 Jews lived in the city; today there are 300.CreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

Iancu and Maria live in a Communist-era apartment block on the west side of town. It has three small rooms — bedroom, kitchen, and a living room mostly filled with a dining table upon which Maria spread petits fours and champagne on an afternoon we came to visit. While a small dog snapped at my older daughter, Iancu showed us a photo of his late wife, Clarissa, who died in 2010. He showed us a photo of himself and Maria, arm in arm with the Israeli ambassador at an embassy party. And he brought out two medals, with proclamations from two Romanian presidents declaring him a “cavaler” (knight) of two national orders, citing his “high moral and professional attitude” and his “contribution to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.” Then Iancu told us, as he has told many Romanian newspaper and television interviewers, about the events in Iasi in June 1941.

Iasi, in northeastern Romania, is where Iancu grew up, as did my grandfather Julius, Iancu’s uncle, who emigrated to the United States shortly before the First World War. The family story is that Julius left Romania to avoid being drafted into the Romanian army, but that, shortly after arriving in the United States, he’d been drafted into the American army and shipped back to Europe. Fortunately, he was the company tailor, a low-fatality position.

Julius’s two sisters emigrated as well, but Julius’s brother Samuel, Iancu’s father, remained in Iasi, which had a large Jewish population and had been an important center of Jewish culture for decades.

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Tombstones in the old Jewish cemetery in Iasi, Romania, mark the graves of Jewish soldiers who died fighting for their country in World War I.CreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

Iasi was also a center of Romanian anti-Semitism, birthplace of the Iron Guard, a precursor to the fascist Romanian government that allied itself with Nazi Germany in World War II. In June 1941, Romania joined its German ally in invading the Soviet Union. When Soviet warplanes bombed Iasi, Romanian authorities accused Iasi’s Jews of being Communist sympathizers who had sent signals to mark targets for Soviet aircraft. A vicious pogrom erupted, planned and encouraged by the Romanian government. A day before it started, Jewish men had been conscripted to dig large trenches in the Jewish cemetery, and Christian families were advised to paint crosses on their houses.

By June 28, Jewish men, women and children were being pulled out of their homes by soldiers, gendarmes and enthusiastic civilian volunteers, who spat on them, beat them — and murdered them, with guns, iron bars and sledge hammers. Other Jews, Iancu among them, were marched through the streets, past battered bodies, to the central police station. Seventy-seven years later, in his little apartment living room, Iancu showed us how he marched that day. Sturdy on his feet, between a couch and the table laden with petits fours, he raised his hands above his head and recalled how a Romanian officer slapped him and took his watch, saying, “Dirty Jew, you won’t need a watch any more.”

Hundreds of Jews were murdered in the streets, and hundreds more in the police station courtyard. From the police station, Iancu was marched to the train station, where thousands of Jews, many dying, some already dead, were crammed into boxcars that took off on long rides to nowhere. One train, carrying 2,500 (the freight manifest marked “Yids”), traveled for six days, crisscrossing from town to town near Iasi, stopping occasionally to offload bodies. No water was given to the prisoners; those who escaped from the train to find some were shot. Those still alive inside the cars, stifling hot and crazed with thirst, drank one another’s urine, stripped off their clothes. Some went mad. Some committed suicide. The vast majority died.

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By The New York Times

Iancu was “lucky.” His train traveled for only eight hours, but it was hellish enough. To avoid falling and being crushed or suffocated, one survivor said, he made benches of dead bodies and sat on them. One hundred and thirty-seven people were crammed into Iancu’s car. “The main thing,” Iancu told us, “was not to exert yourself. Many exhausted themselves, crying, cursing, asking for water. When there were only 25 left alive, I knew my turn was coming, but I had no fear. I said to myself, I have to get out of this train car, I have to get out.” He, and only seven others, did.

After the train, Iancu was held in a local concentration camp, then worked through the war as a slave laborer. (Although Romanian soldiers murdered tens of thousands of Jews in territories they occupied, Jews in Romania itself did not face mass deportations to death camps.) When the war was over, Iancu studied agronomy.

He treated us to a meal one afternoon at a pretty lakeside restaurant in Bucharest’s Herastrau Park. He told us that he lectured about his Holocaust experience several times a year in schools. One student asked him, “Where was God?” Iancu replied, “God was on vacation.”

Now, he ordered a bottle of excellent Romanian red, and we toasted, four Zuckermans and Motti and Maria. The park is lovely. An excursion boat passed on the lake. Iancu took another sip of the wine, Maria by his side. “It is better to be here,” he observed, “than in a mass grave in Iasi.”

The next morning we flew to Iasi. The city is a cultural center with a symphony orchestra, a national theater and a university district flush with parks and cafes. But we arrived with Iancu’s story fresh in our minds, and it didn’t help that a taxi driver, asked to take us to Iasi’s Great Synagogue, professed ignorance of its existence. Recently restored, the elegant synagogue sits in a parklike setting (“Romanian-Israeli Friendship Square”) easily visible from a major intersection. But the driver said he’d never heard of it. Were we sure we didn’t want to go to a church, he asked. “Biserica?” “No,” said Motti, “Sinagoga, Evrei [Jewish].” “Biserica?,” asked the driver.

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The National Theater of Iasi, Romania, above, along with a symphony orchestra and a university district, make the city a cultural center.CreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

We found it despite him, and, nearby, a small Jewish community office. Iasi once had 35,000 Jews. Now it has 300. The woman who runs the office knows Iancu and his story, and she walked us to the spot where Iancu had lived with his family. That building is gone, replaced by a modern hotel. Our guide left us there, and then the four of us (my daughters, cousin Motti, myself) retraced the steps Iancu had taken, hands raised, through a hostile mob, on a summer day in 1941.

We walked down Cuza Voda Street, passing the Golia Monastery, tended by black-robed Orthodox monks, and a variety of shops. Looking around, I tried to imagine what Iancu might have seen that day. Probably not the tattoo parlor, nor the obese male manikin wearing brown pedal pushers, nor the woman with long stringy hair haphazardly dyed turquoise. But a street sweeper wielded a broom that could easily have been from the 1940s, if not the 1640s. And, as an ancient-looking tram clanked by, I looked at its driver, and he gave me what seemed an unfriendly look, and I recalled a line from a history of the pogrom: “The tramway ticket taker Constantin Ifras is reported to have used a crowbar to kill the Segals (father, mother, and two children), who happened to be passing him on the street.”

We walked by Philharmonic Hall, then turned into Vasile Alecsandri Street and reached the courtyard of the former police headquarters, where the Jews of Iasi had been herded and many beaten to death. Now it was a construction site; part will be a Holocaust museum.

From there we walked, as Iancu had, to the train station, where thousands of Jews were crammed into the death trains. It was decorated with a large banner advertising a local film festival. A small plaque on the station wall memorialized “2,713 Jews who died in turmoil after they were crowded into freight wagons, stabbed and tortured.” Inside, passengers waited for trains to Timisoara, Vaslui and Ungheni Prut.

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The 11,000-room Palace of Parliament, in Bucharest, Romania, was part of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's grand vision of a socialist metropolis. It is the largest office building in the world after the Pentagon.CreditSusan Wright for The New York Times

Our final stop was Iasi’s old Jewish cemetery, on a hilltop at the edge of town. We were greeted by a pack of dogs inside the cemetery gates, barking furiously, running toward us, blocked by its iron fence. We entered through a gate some distance away, and the first thing we saw were row after row of identical tombstones, the graves of Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Romania in World War I. Near that, we found the grave of Samuel Joseph Zuckerman, Iancu’s father, my great-uncle. Iancu had told us that his father was so well-regarded that his grave was in a prominent spot, and it was.

Finally, we saw the mass graves where Iancu preferred not to be. There were four of them — 15 feet wide, 90 feet long, flat concrete adorned only with blue Stars of David — enormous. As we were standing there, the dogs found us and came, barking. Motti picked up a large branch and waved it, and the dogs retreated.

Outside again, we could see an adjacent Orthodox Christian cemetery, well maintained and still in business. Below us, we had a panoramic view of Iasi. A woman arrived in a taxi. She got out and, through the fence, started to feed the dogs.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Long-Lost Cousin in Romania Offers a Holocaust Lesson. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe